The Fifth American Republic

[SrWoodchuck]

http://borepatch.blogspot.com/:


BOREPATCH.com-Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Barack Obama is a communist. That's a low schoolyard insult, even though it's true, but it doesn't matter. You see, Mitt Romney is also a commie. No, this isn't yet another Mitt Romney rant. All of our political establishment are commies, and have been for a long time. Buckle up, because this is an uberpost.

I often hear the expression "we're not going to vote ourselves out of this." The older I get it seems, the longer the pelt of my Wookie Suit becomes, and so I can sympathize with people who think we've lost something, something that we won't be getting back easily.

Some ideas which had been stewing in my subconscious since August (!) coalesced when I read a post by Kevin Baker, quoting a John Ringo novel:

(The party) leadership recognizes that in return for supporting a seemingly populist agenda, they can obtain all the votes they require to remain in power. Even the most cursory analysis of their actions and attitudes, however, indicates that they are not populists but, in fact, are strong antipopulists who actively despise their voting base. This....is proven by their efforts to reduce public educational systems to a level most grade-school children (in other countries) have surpassed, with the excuse that this curriculum is all that the students can handle. They have made the inner-city population base totally dependent on the government, which they control.

Well yeah. Our elites are contemptible - everyone agrees with this, and by "everyone" I mean everyone. But the issue isn't whether we can restore a lost past of Ordered Liberty. The question is whether, like Plato's mistaken idealization of Sparta, we yearn for a past that never really was:

Bertrand Russell wrote of this in his A History of Western Philosophy (Allen and Unwin, 1946, p. 114):

To understand Plato, and indeed many later philosophers, it is necessary to know something of Sparta. Sparta had a double effect on Greek thought: through the reality, and through the myth. Each is important. The reality enabled the Spartans to defeat Athens in war; the myth influenced Plato's political theory, and that of countless writers.

And so to our Republic. What is the reality, and what is the myth? It's here we go down Moldbug's rabbit hole, but a marvelous rabbit hole it is:

A few things must be dispensed with. The more obvious is that the US is governed by the principles of the Scottish Enlightenment as encoded in the US Constitution. We are in fact governed by the Puritan concept of ordered liberty, and all the revolution, liberty, freedom, representation blah blah blah crap was only used to transfer power from the British aristocracy to the Puritan merchant and banker elite, and to keep it firmly there. They are assisted by various hunchbacked toadies, notably the Quaker/Methodist/other pacifist Christian bourgeoisie and the Jewish merchants and bankers, but these people should not be mistaken as having any executive function.

...

The PQJs [Puritans/Quakers/Jews - Borepatch] nonetheless thought communism was an excellent form of social organization for the rest of the world- Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America- and the preferred replacement for older authoritarian social systems. Representative democracy could too easily be hijacked by the old elites, as was the constant danger in the West.

And Moldbug suggests that it's not just Eastern Europe, either:

First, I believe anti-Americanism is best described as an epiphenomenon of Universalism. The single most significant fact about the world today is that sixty-two years ago it was conquered by a military alliance whose leader was the United States, and whose creed of battle was this nontheistic adaptation of New England mainline Protestantism. I don't think it's a coincidence that the European ruling class holds essentially the same perspectives that were held at Harvard in 1945. The US Army did not shoot all the professors in Europe and replace them with Yankee carpetbaggers, but the prestige of conquest is such that it might as well have.

I assumed last week that Eisenhower would have similar connections.

So, in response to Ikes defenders, I planned to dig through Ikes connections and see what turned up.

Fortunately, Moldbug chimed in to the comments to point out that Ike chose Joseph Fels Barnes to ghostwrite his memoirs. I guess he couldnt find any non-CPUSA members to write his book. Moldbug also adds, "Eisenhower did not keep Acheson as Secretary of State, but he kept the Acheson-Hiss State Department and indeed collaborated quite enthusiastically in purging its enemies. This was not an accident or a mistake." Indeed, what could be more complicit with communism than not purging the State Department post-Hiss?

The theory of Russia as a client state of the American left helps us understand the behavior of the great Communist spies of the 1940s, Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. Essentially all significant institutions of today's transnational world community - the UN, the IMF, the World Bank - were designed by one of these gentlemen, whose role in passing American documents to Soviet military intelligence is now beyond dispute. John Stormer was right.

Or was he? The thing is that while, technically, Hiss and White were certainly Soviet agents, they hardly fit the profile of a traitor like Aldrich Ames. Hiss and White were at the top of their professions, respected and admired by everyone they knew. What motivation could they possibly have for treason? Why would men like these betray their country?

The obvious answer, in my opinion, is that they didn't see themselves as betraying their country. The idea that they were Russian tools would never have occurred to them. When you see a dog, a leash, and a man, your interpretation is that the man is walking the dog, even if the latter appears to be towing the former.

Hiss and White, in my opinion, believed - like many of their social and cultural background - that the US had nothing to fear from the Soviet Union. They saw themselves as using the Soviets, not the other way around, helping to induce the understandably paranoid Russian leadership to integrate themselves into the new global order.
So a Puritan drive towards the perfectibility of mankind drives the entire political establishment - including Presidents like Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush - to support what on the face would be far left wing policy positions.

They're all dirty commies, ever one of them. Objectively speaking, of course. Think I'm joking?

The Cold War continues, as Moldbug relates:

Anti-Americanism, in this interpretation, is the organizing ideology of an empire. Call it the Blue Empire. The Blue Empire is an American empire, and its headquarters are in Foggy Bottom and Cambridge and Times Square. Anti-Americanists have no idea that they are in fact serving the needs and wishes of the Blue Empire. But then again, why would they?

The Blue Empire's bitter enemy is the Red Empire, whose headquarters is in Arlington and (for the moment [Written in 2007 - Borepatch]) Pennsylvania Avenue. The Red Empire is currently defending itself in Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia - former clients such as Chile, Spain, Portugal, South Vietnam and South Africa having fallen to the Blue side. (The Red Empire still has strong clients in Asia, though, such as Japan, Taiwan and Indonesia.)

If we were going to vote ourselves out of this, we would have done it 60 years ago.

By my count, Anglophone North America ex Canada is on its fifth legal regime. The First Republic was the Congressional regime, which illegally abolished the British colonial governments. The Second Republic was the Constitutional regime, which illegally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The Third Republic was the Unionist regime, which illegally abolished the principle of federalism. The Fourth Republic is the New Deal regime, which illegally abolished the principle of limited government.

Of course, all these coups are confirmed by the principle of adverse possession. Otherwise we would find ourselves looking for the rightful heirs of Metacom, or Edward the Confessor, or whoever. Nor is there any automatic reason to treat any of these five regimes as better or worse than any of the others. If, like me, you're tired of the Fourth Republic and would like to see it abolished, all we know about its successor is that it will be the Fifth Republic. It has no need to resemble the Third, the Second or the First.

And so Obama is a commie, as is Mitt Romney, George Bush major, and Eisenhower. Non-commies (Sarah Palin) are fiercely excluded from the political Great Game. What's different is that information flow now is possible outside of the political and intellectual elite. The perceived legitimacy of this class is now at a historic low. How will it end?


Who can tell? But one thing is clear - it cannot continue as it is, with the Elite papering over the cracks with increasingly low caliber drivel. The Republic waits, expectantly. Maybe it will just be a higher caliber drivel.


The Fifth American Republic does not have to look at all like what has come before.

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A great, if lengthy read.....and it makes some of the shenanigans occuring now....understandable?

[Al_Simmons]

The only sane part of this article is the first sentence. ("Barack Obama is a communist." It would probably be more accurate, however, to call him an ideological Marxist, to avoid any confusion about whether he has ever been a member of the CPUSA, for which there is no evidence, formal CPUSA membership having become uncool decades ago.)

 

Afterwards the article goes right off the rails. A frothy raving of some conspiracy-addled nutburger, filled with lies, half-truths and a few out-of-context truths.

 

I have in my life known one rabid and paranoid conspiracy nut, and this could have been written by his cousin. BTW that person was also an anti-semite par excellence, which is the hallmark of the conspiracy nuts - this fellow above being no exception. (Which is also why conspiracy nuts tend to like, and make excuses for, the Mohammedans - remember the crock about 9/11 being an 'inside job'? But I digress.)

 

This blog isn't worth the price of the $2 trashcan that it belongs in. There is a good reason why its anonymous. Apparently the writer is still sane enough to realize that open association with this type of drivel would not be a good thing to put on his resume.

[Al_Simmons]

Here is a rebuttal post underneath the above on the original linked page:

 

wolfwalker said...

 

I confess to being highly confused, Borepatch. Are you saying that Moldbug has it right, or are you discrediting him by letting his absurdity speak for itself?

 

Because what you quoted is absurd, just about every word, besides being anti-West in general and anti-semitic in particular. I'll give just one example:

 

It is not that the American left was the tool of Moscow. In fact, it was the other way around. From day one, the Soviet Union was the pet experiment of the bien-pensants. It was Looking Backward in Cyrillic. It was the client state to end all client states.

 

This is nonsense, pure and simple. Only someone who knows nothing of European history could believe it. The Soviet Union started as an experiment in Communism -- a concept invented by the European Karl Marx -- and rapidly devolved into the first modern big-government-socialist state, as led first by Vladimir Lenin and then by Josef Stalin. The idea that Stalin was anybody's tool is risible.

 

Meanwhile, the political movement that we today know as the American Left didn't even exist prior to the early 1970s, when the civil rights movement merged with Progressivism to form a perversion of the American Way in which ethnic identity was the only way to judge people, the Intellectuals were the only ones suited to rule, and government's job was to enforce equality of result rather than equality of opportunity.

 

Well, okay, two examples.

 

I don't think it's a coincidence that the European ruling class holds essentially the same perspectives that were held at Harvard in 1945. The US Army did not shoot all the professors in Europe and replace them with Yankee carpetbaggers, but the prestige of conquest is such that it might as well have.

 

Also nonsense. The United States Army had no lasting effect on postwar European government. The European ruling class does hold many of the same ideas that were in vogue at Harvard in 1945, but that's because Harvard in 1945 was a New World colony of European political thought, not the other way round. Europe went socialist in the postwar years because the two World Wars had destroyed the credibility of all other political factions, and because the Socialists promised that under them, there would not be a third war.

October 19, 2011 6:26 PM

[SrWoodchuck]

Al_Simmons! Nice to see you're still monitoring TRR......late nights.

 

Among the other things; you're saying is that the "nutburger" sounds almost "Paulian?"

[Al_Simmons]

Frankly I don't pay Ron Paul enough attention to be able to make such a comparison....

 

...and I'll probably be dropping by a little more often now that the election season is getting into gear ...

 

...am going for Herman right now, but will settle for Romney later (in all likelihood) ... Perry was a real disappointment ... he ought to drop out now ...